Memo To The LPC: Lead Or Resign

Start To Lead Or Get The Fuck Out

One of the things that is most amusing in all of the discourse around the Saudi-funded LIV golf tour is how mad they all are that the rest of the world doesn’t respect them. This week saw Talor Gooch, multiple time winner on LIV that I can guarantee you 99% of casual golf fans have never heard of, say that if Rory McIlroy wins the Career Grand Slam at Augusta in 6 weeks it’ll come with an asterisk. Why, you might ask? Because Gooch, and others who left for LIV, won’t be there.

Rory refused to take the bait this week, and Gooch was mostly mocked, but the source of his grievance is clear – the main way Augusta National gives out invites is through the Official World Golf Rankings, which LIV doesn’t get points towards. (The vast majority of actually good LIV talent are already qualified into the Majors by virtue of past Major performances.) More broadly, however, Augusta in specific and the broader Golf industry have essentially treated LIV as an irrelevance, and it’s driving LIV crazy.

The thrust of all of this is that nobody really cares about LIV. Nobody watches, the big golf content creators don’t do LIV-focused content, and nobody treats a LIV winner like it means anything. The Saudis may have been able to spend a few billion on talent but they can’t make anyone else care. And at some point I realized it’s a solid metaphor for how Canadians think of this government.

Is it true that a lot of the government’s issues are at least partially the fault of the provinces? Sure. Would a Liberal government in Ontario make implementing Trudeau’s agenda easier? Yes. Does it fucking matter to anyone? No. For all that people wail about jurisdiction, the Canadian people get to decide whether this government deserves re-election or not, and right now the answer’s no. In the same way that no amount of bitching will get Talor Gooch into Augusta, no amount of whining about how it’s unfair that Trudeau is blamed for things will reverse the Liberals’ polling.

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Last night I called for the Liberals to call a Royal Commission into government procurement after it came out that $7.6M in government contracts for ArriveCan were given out to a company … whose CEO works for DND … and who later ran for the PPC in 2021. It’s come out that this is not the first contract that this person has been granted, nor is ArriveCan the first procurement debacle in recent times. (As someone who worked on Parliament Hill in 2016, Phoenix owes me for my emotional distress.)

My interest in the substance of a Royal Commission is simple – we can’t procure fuck all in this country without it being a disaster. ArriveCan, Phoenix, every defence project in my lifetime, all of it is a clusterfuck. Every. Single. Time. It costs too much, takes too long, and half the time doesn’t even fucking work properly. That it would also punt a potential political liability for the government to the long grass of inquiries and past the next election is also good for them, but I don’t really care about that.

What was so fucking annoying about this is that the system is clearly fucked, but there’s no efforts here to look at the broad scope of how we procure. No, the government’s first instinct on this and on the Winnipeg Lab story is to focus on deflecting blame. At what point is it worth electing you if everything that happens while you’re in office is the fault of someone else? If the Federal government is entirely impotent why do we even bother having one?

The problem is not that the Federal Government cannot do things, there’s any number of things it can do any day at any time to show Canadians they’re listening and responding to their concerns. You know how I know there’s an ability to do things even when recalcitrant Premiers don’t like it? The fucking Pharmacare deal the Liberals just did with the NDP.

You want some ideas? Here’s a few; Royal Commission into procurement (with teeth), a summit with the 13 provincial justice ministers on crime prevention and specifically auto thefts, a big increase in the powers and the budget of the Competition Bureau to dissuade price gauging, and announce that any province or territory that doesn’t mandate certain zoning principles by, say, October 1^st will lose some amount of their health transfer.

None of those four things would in isolation knock a 17 point lead back to a 4 pointer, but both a proposition of governmental seriousness and a way of showing that they care about the things that people care about it would be a start. It’d also reframe the discussion away from Liberal failure to act back to them as focused on issues people care about.

The problem when Justin Trudeau said that housing isn’t a “primary federal responsibility” is that Canadians understand that he doesn’t give a fuck. When he wants to do things he does them, and whether you like the child care deals and the Pharmacare and the pandemic policies and whatever else, Trudeau has never stopped doing stuff. Your mileage may vary on the utility of his action, but this government has done quite a bit in its time. A lot of that was in direct provincial responsibility, too.

What a lot of Liberal supporters want is to either believe in lies – that the polls are fake or misleading, that a bad interpretation of provincial results and/or provincial polling disproves the Federal polls, or that Poilievre is being pushed out – or accept that the Liberals are down and then engage in fiction on the cause of it. No, the mean press didn’t crater the Liberals’ polls, and believing that doesn’t change the fact that the power to chip away at the lead rests squarely with the Liberals themselves.

At some point it became true that the biggest impediment to the Liberals getting their heads out of their asses is the fervour of a certain section of their supporter base. For whatever potential good they think they’re doing those engaged in conspiracist thinking or poll denial or blame shifting or whataboutism are making it harder for those of us who actually want the party to get their heads out of their asses to be heard. Blaming David Coletto or whoever is a sop to the soul, but it won’t stop Pierre Poilievre getting whatever amount of support as he is going to get. What will stop him getting 42% and 220 seats? The Liberals getting back in the game.

In 2020, I predicted a Biden landslide – I was an unrequited asshole for months on end, secure in my genius and my arrogance and then I had to live through the consequences of that for the last 3 years. Hell, I’m still living with the consequences, in that I know that there are arguments about Biden’s polling and whatever that should be made, but cannot be made by me without everyone fairly dismissing it as the work of Biden copium from a dumbass. My arrogant belief that I was smarter than everyone didn’t change the facts as they came at me.

The Liberals need to get their heads out of their asses or they’re going to get wiped out at the next election. Whether that happens depends in a lot of ways on whether they decide to waste their time bitching about unfairness or understanding where they are and what they have to do with the hand they dealt themselves.

For all our sakes they better not fuck around any longer.